2025 Federal Election platforms leave a lot to the imagination

April 22, 2025

Today the Conservatives became the last political party to publish their “full platform,” which in 2025 seems to be a euphemism for “not nearly as full as before and very late.”

The 30-page Conservative document is down from 160 pages in the 2021 edition. The Liberals have chopped their 2021 page length from 86 pages to 55. That means less real estate for each policy section, including culture, arts and media.

Perhaps because of brevity, the Conservative document is a challenge to decode.

Of course, the Tories say upfront they would defund English-language CBC and permit it to carry on as a “non-profit supported by listeners, donations, sponsorships, ad revenue and licensing revenue.” They expressly exempt Radio-Canada from defunding and in fact promise “to maintain all funding in support of Quebec and Francophone culture.”

The Conservatives would also “repeal Liberal censorship laws.” Since there are none, we’ll just assume that’s a reference to the entirety of the Online Streaming Act which Pierre Poilievre has long promised to reverse. 

The Conservatives would “restore Canadians news on Meta and other platforms.” That either means repealing the Online News Act and returning $100 million to Google, or simply granting Meta an exemption from the Act so that it will agree to end its Facebook and Instagram bans against most Canadian news outlets. The CPC reference to “other platforms” is unclear, as there are no other Big Tech companies banning Canadian news. 

The Conservatives say nothing about undoing the Liberals’ federal “QCJO” subsidies for journalism salaries at private Canadian print news outlets, but it’s doubtful they’ve had a change of heart about abolishing the $65 million annual program.

Nevertheless the CPC platform proposes to double government full funding of journalist salaries in the Local Journalism Initiative federal program, from $20 million to $45 million annually. A further “$25 million in support of Indigenous language media” is promised, although there are no details beyond that.

The Conservatives also promise to “fund the first made-in-Canada documentaries about Canadians’ contributions to winning the World Wars so future Canadians do not forget the courage and sacrifice of those  generations and their stories live on.”

Not to quibble, such state-commissioned documentaries would not be “the first.” The phrasing of the promise raises the question of whether the federal cabinet would be directing one of the CRTC, the National Film Board, the Canada Media Fund, or private broadcasters to make patriotic content. That might be a first.

The Liberals have a light cultural platform when compared to previous election platforms. They restate Mark Carney’s recent campaign promise to increase CBC funding by 11% and commit to long-term stability in funding.

Other than that the Liberals promise to “increase funding to agencies such as the Canada Council for the Arts, Telefilm, the Canada Media Fund, and the National Film Board.” For those of you that don’t track these things, in practice “increasing” funding often turns out to be adjusting budgets to keep up with inflation.

What’s noticeably absent in the Liberal platform is the government’s Online Safety Act, Bill C-63, which died on the order table in February. Perhaps it fell to the editor’s red pen.

The NDP did not publish a single platform document but provided a series of issue-oriented documents, none of which dealt with the culture, media or the arts; traditional NDP policies.

The Greens and the Bloc Québécois published lengthy documents with detailed cultural proposals that I won’t attempt to summarize.

The Bloc is the only party to propose extending tax rules that provide corporate tax relief to Canadian businesses that advertise in legacy Canadian media to the placement of ads online. 

Here are the party platforms (except for the NDP):